Do You Love Me or What? Read online

  ‘So Dad was always hungry,’ l said.

  My Aunt cried out so loudly the nurse returned.

  ‘You must not upset her or we’ll have to ask you to leave!’

  ‘It’s not her fault – it’s her father’s – he told her nothing about the family!’

  The nurse hesitated, then went away.

  ‘They were starving!’ she cried. ‘And of course there was Hannah—’

  I almost shouted: ‘What was my grandmother like?’

  My Aunt clanged the cup on the saucer.

  ‘That’s why I shouted at her! I had to take George’s part!’

  She saw my look of incomprehension. ‘You’ve never been told anything, have you?’

  She was exasperated that it all had been left to her.

  ‘Most of the time—’ she looked over her shoulder, bent her old white head towards me so not even Hannah’s ghost would hear:

  ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she took any money there was, and drank it. That’s why the children hated her. There were some government programs for the deserving poor but because of Hannah, the family wasn’t the deserving poor. And then – what she got up to when she was drunk!’

  She slumped in her chair, deciding to spare me. But I didn’t want to be spared, I had to know.

  ‘Tell me.’

  The old woman couldn’t pollute the air.

  ‘George often said that your father took the brunt of it.’

  ‘But she was drunk – not in sound mind—’

  ‘George often said that it was no wonder your father married a Spanish beauty. Not just because of her looks, which an artist would care about, of course, but she didn’t look like his past, didn’t remind him of that horror.’

  I should’ve taken this as a clue, but I didn’t, what with the old woman talking so angrily, reliving the past, and my fear that the nurse would return.

  ‘Please, let’s just chat about George. Tell me how you met.’

  But she was wound up.

  ‘George and Arthur went to work as soon as they could. But they had to hide their earnings, or she’d drink it. Till the end of his life George was proud that the two of them managed to make life easier for the younger ones. Jumpers, boots, food. The boys knew they could get killed in the munitions factory but dying was better than the family being thrown into those workhouses.’

  ‘Then my father disowned them all to go to sea,’ I whispered sadly, because I didn’t want to stop believing in him.

  ‘Never!’ cried my Aunt so passionately that I glanced up to check where the nurse was. ‘Whenever his ship came to London, he’d get word to George, and George would come to meet him at the docks. He’d hand over his wages to George, never to Hannah. He never saw Hannah again once the ship sailed away.’

  My Aunt’s words tumbled over each other.

  ‘So one day I shouted at her – I just couldn’t bear what she’d done. And then, after she’d died, after George had died, I met a distant cousin, and she told me about Hannah’s childhood. I thought you knew that I’d lost my temper with her, I thought that’s why you’d come. To tell me off!’

  She paused with this old grief, and made folds in the quilt with trembling fingers.

  ‘I knew nothing,’ I said.

  So she told me the story of my grandmother: Hannah had come from a mill family, working in the cotton mills of Scotland, the so-called Satanic mills. By the time she was ten, with no one in the world to help her, she’d nursed her sick father and then her sick mother to their slow, agonising deaths from consumption.

  ‘In poverty, like Dad?’ I asked, struggling to place it, to find somewhere in my heart for this hated drunkard.

  ‘Worse. Scotland’s poverty was worse, far worse. Hannah had worked with them in the mills since she was five.’

  I was picturing a heart-shaped little face with tangled ringlets, but that was the face of my beautiful mother: my mother whose beauty was her only and useless passport. I had to adjust the image to a skinny, plain little girl, clothed in rags amongst the decay and stench that was her home.

  ‘There would’ve been people helping her – they wouldn’t have let a child struggle with that alone, surely,’ I said.

  My Aunt laughed.

  ‘You still don’t understand. No district nurses then for the poor. No doctor. No pills.’

  ‘But neighbours—’

  ‘It was a very infectious disease. Even if your heart was torn out for the child, you couldn’t run the risk of going near her and infecting your own family.’

  ‘What happened to her when her mother died?’

  ‘No one knows. Apparently the mill wouldn’t take her back – they thought she’d infect their workers. It beggars belief. Maybe she was selling her body – who knows? Ten years old! Word got around and her elder sister guiltily turned up out of the blue – she’d been keeping her distance at Pitlochry because she’d married well and didn’t want her marriage ruined. That’s how Hannah got to live in Pitlochry.’

  ‘So at least they gave her a home.’

  ‘Well, she’d discovered drink. The sister’s husband was a caretaker and they were worried Hannah would lose him his job. So they married her off at fifteen to your grandfather and she went to London with him, out of the way.’

  There were tears in our eyes.

  ‘And I abused her! The poor woman. The poor child.’

  We both cried amongst the toppling cups, we brushed each other’s wet cheeks with our hands. We held hands. It’s little comfort, holding hands, but it was all we could do. And my Aunt’s were trembling.

  ‘I’d have done what you did,’ I said.

  ‘Would you, dear?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

  After a while, something inside us both seemed to settle.

  ‘Why didn’t they tell the children?’ I asked.

  ‘People thought like that then,’ she said. ‘They believed that you shouldn’t burden the young.’

  ‘Telling would’ve saved a lot of pain,’ I said.

  We fell into silence. Then she broke it.

  ‘George would never touch a drop. He was scared he’d take after her. Superstition, of course. Of all of them, he looked the most like her. The dead spit. He was scared, that since he’d inherited her face, he’d inherited her tendencies. If only George had known her story. He could’ve made up with her before she died. She died with all her children hating her.’

  My Aunt was getting loud and agitated again. I said, to change the subject:

  ‘Did George ever think of following Dad to Australia?’

  The old woman sighed again. My ignorance was exhausting her. So she explained the last piece of the puzzle, the piece that without it, the rest meant nothing at all.

  ‘George didn’t dare.’

  ‘Dare?’

  ‘It might’ve complicated things for your dad.’

  She was moving her old knees in her chair, preparing herself, as if she had to spring up. She hadn’t had to work so hard for years, with this job of making me understand.

  ‘I tried to give Dad a plane ticket back to see George,’ I was saying. ‘Dad wouldn’t take it.’

  ‘Your dad believed he wouldn’t have got back in,’ the old woman managed.

  ‘In? To England?’

  ‘To Australia! It’s a wonder they never caught him,’ the old woman continued, getting strength. ‘His name would’ve turned up on official documents – he must’ve stayed ahead of them somehow.’

  ‘His name? Which name?’

  ‘He must’ve lived in fear all his life,’ she said. ‘There would’ve been such a fuss.’

  Too late I remembered the word ‘fuss’, the word I never questioned.

  ‘He didn’t enter Australia properly,’ the old woman said.

  ‘He jumped ship – was that—?’

  ‘George told him that there were amnesties but your father, with his background, probably wouldn’t have trusted officials, or even registere
d what amnesties were, with all your family’s strife going on.’

  And so at last the old woman found the words to say it.

  ‘He left England in a hurry – you know he was running away from Hannah – and when he got to Australia, he jumped ship. That was a criminal offence.’

  I said, hotly, suddenly knowing as the words came out of my mouth that what had been an explanation for me and my brothers would’ve have been no explanation for the rest of the world:

  ‘But anyone would sympathise – he fell in love with the Australian light!’

  ‘He was an outcast in England because of the poverty, and an outcast in Australia,’ the old woman cried.

  I had forgotten the nurse. She was suddenly upon us.

  ‘You’d better go – you’re exhausting her.’

  ‘I love her being here,’ said my Aunt.

  But I didn’t want her exhaustion on my conscience.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to both of them.

  We hugged a tearful goodbye, then she pulled away from me, tipped her white head on one side to gaze at me and said:

  ‘It’s been such a comfort, you visiting me. I’m so glad you came. It’s been like having George back for a while. You know, you’re the dead spit of him. Your father didn’t tell you that either? The same red hair, the same blue eyes! I won’t say the dead spit of Hannah, but you are, and I mean it kindly. The dead spit.’

  Shame

  Diana knew he’d be there, so she decided on her black, that’s if she could still get into it. Of course he probably wouldn’t remember it. She’d always known Bob’s eyes swivelled over women’s bodies – why hadn’t she taken that as a warning? – and there’d surely be some wisp of memory left in him of her slender almost childish shape, the rounded belly almost gone now. But the shoes. They’d have to be heels, as high as she could manage, to set off the flattering folds of the skirt. The first heels since the baby. She’d be sitting down for most of the evening, in fact probably for the entire evening, apart from a walk across the pavement to and from the taxi, and for that she must be straight-backed and striding. There was the walk to the stage, but of course it was most unlikely she’d have that worry, given that her work was up against Bob’s.

  But when she fossicked at the bottom of the wardrobe, she found the heels of her good shoes, the ones other than the sneakers, had bits of leather hanging off like little streamers. Peter might be able to glue them down, but the sides were scuffed. Of course, the lighting might be low, but she should make an effort. Narelle had taught her that.

  And the makeup, all her makeup was still in the bathroom cupboard where she’d left it before the baby, and her hair was lanky, a cut badly needed, especially the fringe. She’d use the curlers, curl the fringe and then brush it away from her face, and that would have to do.

  Bob had been much older than her, twenty years, but one of those indestructible men, especially in a well-cut suit, and with such luminous vigour. When he entered a party, he’d hold up his arms high, waving them, inviting cheers, suggesting anything that had gone wrong in the room – snubs, teeth broken on the nuts, tiffs between friends, the best wine spilled, love affairs devastated – nothing would matter anymore, that was what his uplifted arms proclaimed. In his wake, she’d been a rocky little dinghy. She was an edger into rooms.

  He’d said over and over again that Narelle was the most boring friend he had, and he was an expert, given his hundreds of friends – why, she was indisputably the most boring woman in the world. It was a joke, their shared joke; the phone would ring frequently at dinner time and he’d make a face and say: ‘That’ll be the most boring woman in the world – would you keep my dinner hot?’ On the phone, he’d be yes, yes, and then he’d wink at Diana from time to time, yes, yes. Face turned partly towards her. Wink. Yes.

  Bob was a comedy screenwriter and Diana found most of his work funny, and as for the rest, she blamed herself. It must be her mood, or her stupidity. Not that she thought herself stupid; in fact, she thought her mind was her best asset. On most points, Diana believed, she and Bob had the same views. About Narelle, she tried not to disagree.

  Narelle was lonely though married, and unhappily married though painstakingly glamorous. Her loneliness was why they had to include her, though it didn’t explain why she was always in exhaustingly tight skirts, and helplessly wobbling high heels. Diana on the other hand, despite her pretty face, slender body, dark eyes and red hair that blew behind her like a russet scarf, would prefer no one noticed her. She always wore loose shirts or trousers, or even, when she didn’t think Bob would notice, track suits. She was a woman so careless of her appearance that often Bob would remind her as they got into bed that she hadn’t brushed her hair all day. She’d guiltily promise that tomorrow she’d make an effort. But she preferred to be a bookish, serious person and surely that was sufficient, she thought. She worked at home as a literary editor and editing to her was setting things to rights, as important as bad governments being thrown out, or as death being cured. But, perhaps inspired by the manuscripts she read, it amused her to jot down odd thoughts of her own on anything handy – receipts, torn off cardboard, paper serviettes, tissues, even, on occasion, toilet paper – and stick all the bits on a nail that Bob had obligingly hammered through a piece of wood. It was kept on the kitchen counter in a dark corner under the kitchen clock, so that Bob could riffle through the bits and pieces and appropriate anything he liked for his own work. He was a proudly competitive man, the best in the business, he hoped, but in a good mood he’d say that his work stood out from the crowd because of her precious material.

  ‘What’s precious about it?’ she’d asked several times.

  ‘It has the ring of truth,’ he’d always say.

  Diana would shrug. The jottings came out of nowhere, and seemed dictated, almost as if she were their secretary, and that unnerved her. But she believed Bob treasured her for her mind, and she felt assured of his devotion when the bits from the nail turned up on television or film.

  Then came a different phone call from Narelle. He faced directly into the phone. No winks. No glances. ‘How terrible. He didn’t! No! You poor thing. No! Of course, right away.’ And afterwards, over the dinner they’d both forgotten to keep hot, came the news that Narelle’s husband had brought home his mistress; no one had guessed there’d be a mistress, especially poor Narelle, poor Narelle! – despite her painted fingernails and thin silk blouses. So of course Narelle had to leave him immediately, but how, and where, especially given her poodles, her five bouncing yappy poodles – he’d said he’d shoot them if she left them and what was she to do, they couldn’t go with her to a hotel. Would Bob come around right now, this very minute, and help her work it out, her best friend, her most trusted friend? So Bob abandoned his dinner, which had already congealed, and he’d gone, by himself, of course, because he was the friend, not Diana, and he returned with a request from poor suffering Narelle. An unexpected request. Could they mind the poodles, yappy, bouncing, milling things that they were? asked Bob, not winking now because poor Narelle was really suffering. They were clean and not at all smelly; in fact, like their owner, they were always elegant, always off to the dog salon, curls high, brushed, sweet-smelling and snow white. ‘Of course the poodles must stay with us,’ said Diana, who’d always intended to make friends with Bob’s best friend one day. The gates were tight, the garden was big, a quarter-acre block so the dogs wouldn’t even need to be taken for walks. That would be the least she and he, in their happy union, could do for poor Narelle. Except that soon Bob was to travel to another old friend, this one two weeks off dying, the doctors said, and in distant Tahiti. Diana had a deadline, so she couldn’t go with him. He, usually impatient with her deadlines, was sympathetic for once, even though it would be their first separation ever.

  ‘The heart will grow fonder,’ he said.

  But Diana could manage the poodles, couldn’t she, for him, for the sake of his old friend, for poor Narelle? Of cour
se she could.

  So the dogs moved in, along with a bag or two of dried dog food, and Bob left. And Diana bowed her head to her work and fed the poodles.

  On the first day of his absence, her phone rang. It was under her papers and she didn’t get to it in time, a blocked number, so perhaps an institution, not Bob, unless he was ringing from his friend’s hospital – in fact, was he already in Tahiti? He hadn’t rung her, which was odd. She went back to work but the phone rang again, and this time she scrabbled under the right papers and picked it up.

  A doctor from the local hospital; she recalled his long, serious face, the way his wrinkled heavy upper eyelids had blinked, considering her uncertain future. He had thick, pale, purple lips that protruded in thought as she’d told him their grief; they couldn’t conceive a baby and surely it must be her fault because Bob already had two daughters, now grown up, and she’d never been pregnant, probably never could be. One can’t ever be sure, the long-faced doctor had said, not till the test results are in.

  Now on the phone he was sympathetic. ‘I know how you both yearned.’ He had bad news. The tests. Oh she was fine, she hadn’t been the problem after all. But Bob – husband? Partner – Bob, her partner. It was his sperm. Because of his age. ‘Certainly he might have been fine twenty years ago. But now, no motility. What’s motility? To put it in layman’s terms, his sperm couldn’t swim. Nothing to be done. No reliable medication. No surgery. Should he post them the written report?’ It was easier to think about that issue. But Bob might open the letter, read the report, his hopes falling to pieces. She hesitated. The kindly voice said he could hold it at the front desk, she could pick it up anytime, he could do that at least for her. ‘I understand your pain,’ he ended.

  The room was suddenly silent as if a fierce wind had blown out all the air, the dogs trooping outside as if they’d fled the news, clacking on the shining floorboards like shoeless ballet dancers with long toenails. But now she wanted their company and called them back. She didn’t even know their names. She had lost touch with friends of her own, for Bob had thought them too bookish – like her, she suddenly realised with a thud. For a second, she thought of calling Narelle, Bob’s oldest friend, but of course she couldn’t, that would be an imposition, even a betrayal. After a while, she gathered herself up and wandered to the kitchen and watched the kettle boil for tea. How to tell him?